Filed Under: "bonus limbs"

Detail from panoramic illustration for article “Arts and the Man,” Park East magazine, May 1953. Flora served as the publication’s art director in 1952, but moved on to full-time freelancing in January 1953. His successor in the Park East AD chair was his longtime colleague Robert M. Jones, who had also succeeded Flora as AD at Columbia Records in 1945. Jones jobbed out several Park East illustration assignments to Flora. The following year, Jones was…

Acrylic on canvas (20″ x 16″), mid-1990s, one of countless unpublished and previously uncirculated (and mischievous and unfathomable) late-life works in the Flora archives.

Detail from the Lord Buckley 10″ EP Hipsters, Flipsters, and Finger-Poppin’ Daddies, Knock Me Your Lobes, released on RCA Victor in 1955. Left to right: sports-fan centaur, polycephalic saxophonist, jubilant wench. Body count: three figures, eight legs, four heads. We issued a (very) limited edition print (10) of this iconic Flora cover in 2007. Copies of the original cover fetch beaucoups bucks on Ebay.

Celebrities, pen & ink, early 1990s, from sketchbook Update: Issued as an open edition fine art print in 2010.

Jim Flora Art has released a limited-edition, archival-quality fine art print of a 1960 Flora painting entitled Big Evening. The hyperactive tableau depicts a cavalcade of misshapen, multi-eyed mutants with bonus body parts. People just like you! The work was produced in an edition of 25. Nine were sold in the first two days after release, our most successful new print launch.

Flora found them irresistible. Surplus heads too.

Just released: a new Flora fine art print. The Big Bank Robbery (edition of 30) was reproduced from an undated tempera on board that reflects the nuances of Flora’s mid-1960s style. (The title was handwritten on the reverse.) The three-tiered tableau depicts colorful Flora mayhem: inscrutable monsters with misshapen features, Lego architecture, bug-eyed buildings, gumdrop color fills, and—yes—a bank robbery.

There are five figures in this undated (late 1960s-early 1970s) Flora tempera, owned by Eric Kohler (who purchased it from the artist in the early 1990s). Two are extracted above. They—and their three unseen compatriots—will not be featured in our forthcoming third Flora anthology. There’s plenty of great unpublished images for volume four (target publication date 2012). Sorry if we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Two characters, five legs. This acrylic on canvas (15-3/4″ x 20″, late 1990s) almost made it into our forthcoming book, but was edged out by a plethora of prominent works. Flora produced some interesting, mystifying paintings in his final decade (after, by his own admission, “painting myself out of boats” in the late 1980s). Above is a low-grade snapshot corrected in Photoshop; the recently discovered work has not yet been professionally documented. A postulant is…

The Rover Boys, tempera on board, ca. 1943. The work was presented as a wedding gift to Clara Gee Kastner and Stanley Stamaty, Flora’s classmates and friends from the Art Academy of Cincinnati. (Clara and Stan are the parents of cartoonist Mark Alan Stamaty.) No idea if the triple-headed figure was intended to portray the Rover lads of literary fame. The work was reproduced in The Curiously Sinister Art of Jim Flora A pen and…

Our latest Jim Flora fine art print is White Block Quadrupeds (an informal name for the above untitled work). WBQ is an uncirculated, early 1940s Flora painting which depicts an inscrutable panorama of disconnected facial features, headless quadrupeds, and a fanged horse. The original was painted in tempera on a thick rectangular block of wood the artist had first swathed in a coat of white. The stylized figures echo motifs found in the artist’s work…

Duos, a collection of works by Charles Wuorinen composed for two musicians, is now available from Albany Records. The untitled Flora cover art, licensed for this release (by Howard Stokar), is from an early- to mid-1960s sketchbook.